A 25-year-old woman who drowned in a West Side quarry today was the second person to die in the
water there this summer.

Brittanie Pederson went to the Runaway Bay apartments with three men about 1:30 a.m. to
jump off the cliffs near Dublin Road and W. 5th Avenue, Columbus police said. A resident on the
other side of the quarry called 911 to report that he could hear several people jumping.

“There’s at least one chick, and she doesn’t sound like she wants to do it,” the man said, “but
they keep trying to insist on it.”

Pederson jumped off the cliff and surfaced, police said. But then she disappeared. Her friends
and police initially thought she was hiding. When they couldn’t find her, dive squads showed up to
search.

Her body was found hours later, and she was pronounced dead at 7:27 a.m. Her mother, Cheryl
Chapman, sobbed in the parking lot of the complex after divers pulled her daughter’s body from the
water.

Two of the men who had been swimming with Pederson — Robert Durkin, 34, and Christopher Kahl, 27
— declined to comment when contacted by a Dispatch reporter. The third, Ronald Temple, 24, couldn’t
be reached.

Pederson had worked as a waitress at Jimmy V’s Grill & Pub, 1788 W. 5th Ave., for several
months, part-owner Jeff Stavre said. She had clocked out at 10 p.m. Thursday, he said.

“She was a great girl, always smiling,” Stavre said.

In May, 20-year-old Devon Clark jumped about 25 feet into the water with four friends near the
same spot where Pederson had jumped. After surfacing, he started to panic and went underwater, his
friends said. His body was pulled from the water shortly afterward. A third person, 21-year-old
Daniel M. Monnin, drowned after jumping into the quarry on Aug. 20, 2010.

Three months earlier, 16-year-old Rico Butler, a Hilliard Davidson High School student, drowned
while swimming with friends in a nearby quarry off Dublin Road.

Signs around the quarries warn against cliff-jumping, and residents are used to calling the
police. The man who called 911 early yesterday morning nonchalantly explained to the dispatcher
that it was dark and “that’s pretty much usually when they die over there.”

This summer, police have received at least 68 reports of cliff-jumping at Runaway Bay. Residents
sometimes called multiple times a day.

The day after Clark’s death, police received three calls from residents complaining about
cliff-jumpers, including parents who were teaching their child how to dive off the cliff.